Ask Lemmy

Infinite scroll pages are inherently worse than a set number of pages you can jump between at will. The fact almost everything has swapped to that is a nightmare and makes looking for old things on a blog or hell even a YouTube Playlist a nightmare.

Elements should not even be clickable for at least 0.5 seconds after first appearing.

Every action should be accessible from the keyboard. Stretch goal: The OS should be able to describe all UI events in prose.

Windows 11's UI is fine.

I have so many issues with Windows: the privacy invasion, the ads, the upselling of MS's services, the need for an online Microsoft account, that I haven't used Windows in over 2 years. But I see so many people saying it has an ugly UI - it's UI is literally fine, I would have no problems using it if a Linux DE happened to come up with that design before Microsoft did.

Flat Minimalism is fine, but the buttons should still look like and animate like buttons. How the fuck is one supposed to know that text is clickable if it isn't blue or raised like a button?

I like chunkier scrollbars. Fuck the tiny disappearing scrollbars where you need to mouse over... somewhere.. to maybe be graced with its presence, only for it to be 1px wide for some reason.
Also fuck the endless scroll, especially when you already know what you're looking for is on page 4 because you had to reload the page for some reason but the infinite scroll didn't save your position and you have to go down (without an actual scrollbar) only to "load more" 3 times until you're (maybe) on page 4.

Overriding browser functionality because of designer preferences or shitty implementation of tracking or whatever.

Don't fuck with my scrolling.

Don't fuck with my ctrl clicking to open links in a new tab.

Don't capture window keyboard events unless you have a really excellent reason to and even then think about it really hard and decide not to.

And learn how to support basic keyboard navigation, damn it. It's just about marking up your html properly, no scripting required.

I think all of these opinions are popular on the user side.

Some apps will have the search icon at the bottom of the screen. Then the search bar pops up at the top. Then you tap that for the keyboard to come up at the bottom. I think a search button should automatically pop up a keyboard.

Any button that's grayed out should say why it's grayed out when you hover the cursor over it, or attempt to tap it.

I absolutely hate those scrolling number pickers, like on alarm apps. Just pop up the numpad and I can enter a time in 2-4 taps, not 2-3 coarse scrolls of minutes, a fine scroll to the minute I actually want, then repeat that process on the hours.

Scroll bars are way too fucking thin now. When I have an app on one monitor, and try to scroll it, I’m battling the move to the next monitor with the teensy tiny scrollbar.

I’m even someone that knows how to use the mouse wheel and page down keys. It still has its place and so many refuse to acknowledge that. Sometimes I can’t even tell where on the page I am because the scrollbar activated its Octocamo.

Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to be all rounded now?

Unpopular because most people don't notice at all, not because they disagree:

Bring back ellipsis to signal a new dialog instead of a complete action. E.g., a button "Save..." opens a dialog where you want to save, whereas a button "Save" saves it immediately

• Stop removing the underline styling for links. It's not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.
• I don't like emoji in text interface output. I don't need cute little sparkle graphics and yellow smiley faces and lightning bolts and rocket ships to tell me the operation was successful, to say nothing of environments where emoji aren't supported and it's just broken.
• Please stop trying to be cute or hip with your basic interface messaging. "We got you, we'll find those results you need. Just hang tight, OK?" "Oops, our bad, there was a little hiccup in the process..." It's unnecessary padding just like all the rounded corners everywhere. Exception if the entire app/site/whatever is specifically designed around being cute and friendly, but I see this all the time where it just feels out of place, disingenuous, and obnoxious.
• Custom fonts and nonstandard characters in usernames are an abomination. Show your personality and creativity in your graphical avatar and your profile, I'm happy to see it there!

Colorblind people exist and should be able to use the site. At least, based on my real experience, this must be an unpopular opinion amongst UI folks glares

Using window managers that have shortcuts for tiles improves both the UX and general productivity. I'm not quite so elitist as to say the point and click GUIs are objectively worse but power users are missing out if they don't invest some time in learning keyboard based window management.

single page apps. I fucking HATE all these apps that straight refuse to allow you to open multiple tabs.

the links are JS action hooked to redirect you instead of just linking you to the page.

it's fucking bullshit.

also, fuck webp.

If it doesn't need JavaScript, it shouldn't have JavaScript.

If it doesn't need dynamic styling, it shouldn't have dynamic styling (especially if it makes other elements move around or become occluded).

If it doesn't need images, it shouldn't have images. When it does need images, they should be in an appropriate format and minimum useful filesize.

It shouldn't have audio. It doesn't need audio, and should not have it.

The modern trend for "flat" UIs absolutely sucks. There is no separation between element layers, so you can't tell where one windows starts and another begins when they are overlapping.

Setup wizards that let you configure some settings easily but not telling you where to change them later.

Since this thread is really about complaining about UI, I'll add that when the developer arbitrarily limits input ranges because "Why would anyone what that?"

I've come across this several times, but the one instance that pops to mind is a desktop background changer being limited to no less than one minute between changes. I wanted to use it to show a stop-motion animation slide show and set it to one second, not the intended use, but still viable IF I could set the rate to one second. I wrote the developer, and they admitted it could be allowed, but "Why would anyone want it to be that fast?" I get that there are technical reasons why this might not be ideal, and maybe it would somehow tax the system for "just a background changer", etc. But, assuming a value wouldn't crash the application, or somehow physically destroy the computer, I think the input should be allowed. If prudent, put some warning about the less-than-catastrophic consequences, and let the user confirm before continuing.

For every UI app that runs commands in the background, Instead of a "Doing XYZ. Please Wait", I want the logs of the commands being run. Not just the commands themselves, but their verbose outputs too. I want it ALL on display.

I want to know what the software I am using is doing to my computer. I dont want black box software on my PC.

I don't have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don't see people echo much, yet.

One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it's also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.

Switches have become way to obvious to what "on" and "off" is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn't clear whether it's saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.

Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.

Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?

Microsoft's "Ribbon" interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything's a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it's harder to scan through them to find the option you're looking for.

Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design

I don't know how unpopular this is - I've never asked anybody:

Phone-optimised UIs suck, even on phones. One of the first things I do on setting up a new phone is tick 'request desktop website' in the browser.

Modal dialogs. Making it impossible to move the window or reference something else in the same interface.

Toasts on android. No idea where the toasts came from and no way to look up what the toast said after it disappears.

People don't think enough of contrast and colour choices.

For example, icons.

I kept launching the wrong popular streaming video app. One was red and white, the other was white and red.

I have pinned some app icons but I really need to squint sometimes. So many blue icons.

Modern UI trend in graphics apps is to use monochrome hieroglyphs for tool icons. Fuck that, give me colour icons. Can't tell the tools apart. It's not even visually appealing. What.

Games use really creative colour schemes. Then in the first dialog they show in the game, they have two choices, and I guess I just have to guess which button is which because it's impossible to tell which is the "active" colour.

Ooh, fancy scroll bar you have there. Really blends to the background. Can barely see it.

A lot of lectures and presentations are silly when people show a web page and I can barely make out the domain because the rest of the URL is grey mush. And I'm sitting in the front. (I can barely make sense of it the address bars on my monitor. Firefox at least lets you disable this nonsense)

Another big beef I have with modern UIs, especially mobile ones: If you put something on the screen, would it be possible to not randomly move the stuff around? (For example: I tried to click the latest conversation in Signal desktop. In the time between my decision and the mouse click, Signal noticed that it has been several femtoseconds since the last software update, and popped an update notice right where the top of the conversation list is. Guess what I clicked.)

Another thing: Overreliance on scroll wheel. In case you haven't noticed, scroll wheels aren't very reliable. They get gunky and are hard to clean. Give me the bloody scrollbar. In games, let me rebind zoom.

The hamburger button is an abomination, we need the proper menus back

Every modern design trend sucks. Overly minimalistic/simplistic UI harms usability and actively makes users dumber and helpless.

I don't want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc...

Give me boring panels with clear boundaries between conceptual sections, explicit text on buttons, and no theming. I don't care if it's a fugly Win95 grey, I'd rather it be usable than flashy.

• If it can be done without a touch screen DO NOT use a touch screen. And if you use physical buttons, they should have tactile feedback
• Toggles are just more ambiguous over-designed checkboxes

I don't know if it's unpopular but I think the cookies should have a white list policy instead of a black list.

And in general I think that a UI has to take into account people with visual problems. "Everything is gray" is a shitty idea.

Having ambiguous toggle labels should cause you to lose your job

Don't have a window named something like "Disable Features" and then the options be a toggle for "Cookies" or "Carry weight"

Does turning the toggle ON turn the feature OFF? Or do I need to turn the toggle to OFF to turn the feature OFF? Even worse when some are already in the off position.

A lot of so called "dark mode" should be called "medium mode" or "gray mode". In my opinion "dark mode" is where the main colour of backgrounds looks more black than gray. Also all borders should be high-contrast, preferably brightly coloured lines, or medium-contrast for low-importance borders, but never low-contrast borders or borders without a line where it's just a change in background colours.